Last week a couple members of the Nandoca app team went out to Liverpool to take part in the Merseyside Patrao meeting. We were there because starting this week the app is being rolled out to 500 Nandocas across the 9 restaurants in the area!
Why Merseyside?
To date the app has been released to restaurants one at a time. This is a great way for us to learn what release processes work best and how the app works in different restaurants, but it isn’t a great way to reach large numbers of restaurants. To solve that we wanted to try releasing to an entire MD area all at once.
We chose to work closely with Maz (the MD) and Merseyside because we are keen to partner with a small group of restaurants to learn about the future of stories in the app. How do we make news more relevant, more local, and more valuable for Nandocas every day?
We first started working with Maz during one of our content workshops and were really excited by all the work he was doing to gather the stories coming out of his restaurants in his weekly newsletter. One of the most important functions of the app is telling stories from across the business, and we’re at a stage where we want to learn about how news can be improved. Maz’s area seemed a natural candidate as his Patraos are already used to collecting and telling stories and could help us learn ways to deliver those stories better.
The release process
Merseyside restaurants will all be receiving boxes in the post this week which contain booklets of helpful info about the app, posters for their staff room, and a couple other surprises from the app team. The launch materials will be used to support staff meetings in each restaurant, in which the Patrao and management team will work together to get Nandocas on the app.
We absolutely couldn’t do this without the help and support of all the amazing Patraos in Merseyside, and their awesome MD Maz!
Future releases
The releases don’t stop at Merseyside. We’re working towards releasing a version of the app to the app panel shortly - we’ll have more updates on that closer to the time so watch this space!